The Floppy Drive in a Musical Context

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1.1 Mechanism of a “musical” floppy drive
The floppy drive itself is musical in a certain way depending on what people may perceive as musical such as the sound of friction. In my project, the floppy drive makes sounds through pitched notes due to friction between the read-write head and the diskette. It produces notes since the diskette has contact friction with read write head, in revolution. Recall that sine waves can be viewed as the progression of a circle over time, or a revolution. Spinning at higher speeds increases the pitch and also the frequency. The spindle motor spins the floppy drive at a certain speed controlled by the microcontroller. Then, read write head will be positioned on the diskette with a drive motor that will propel it up and down on the floppy disk, making a precise pitch that audible for the human ears. For example, when we use a saw or a blender, the audible noise we hear when the machine spins is a certain pitch or sometimes a narrow band noise since there is not an exact pitch associated with it. The timbre of the musical floppy drive is quite unique and also very resonant in terms of vibration. However, due to a lack of slower spin speed, the device is unable to play low pitched notes very well. On the other hand high pitched notes are quite easy to play. Floppy drives are limited to a certain range of notes to be played at the same time, you would require many floppy perform chords unless they have the same notes. Also, the floppy drive does not play commanded notes on its own; it requires electrical signals to run through its 34 pin connections. In this case, only a six pins are required to be connected between the Arduino and the floppy drive. These pins runs the electrical command from the Ardu...

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...py drive history
I will not go into much detail because the musical floppy disk has been around for barely a decade and a few years. Its history has not been monitored so the discovery of its musicality remains unknown, but floppy drives that are converted into music players have been starting to spread on the Web since 2007 when a YouTube video about the musical floppy drive was posted but it is not possible to determine if it had existed before that date. There is a lot of missing information on this matter and it remains open to debate whether who was first or what time was it created. According to Google statistic, the internet search engine, it was around 2008 that people started looking up on floppy drives performing music. In brief, there is a big gap on the history of floppy drive “music”, however, we do have a few dates that may be useful but not credible.

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